Video transcription

Hello, I'm Steve Skinner with Kathryn's Garden. We're talking about winter planning for spring gardens and I would like to give you some tips on plant care in the winter time. Here I have a raised bed containing lettuce and garlic that I planted during the fall and there are some practical ways that we can extend this crop and protect it throughout the winter. The first practical thing that we can do is weeding. Weeds establish themselves in the wintertime; but, when springtime comes and the soil warms, the weeds explode in growth and become a problem. So, the best thing to do is to eliminate the weeds now before they're large so that we won't have to in the springtime. Besides, who wants to be weeding when you can plant your spring vegetables. Okay, now that we have the bed weeded, we need to mulch. We need to choose a good mulch, something like pine straw or bark or leaves. Pine straw, keep in mind, has an acidic value to it and it'll drive your soil pH down into the acid category. So, check the pH of your soil before you do the pine straw, but, it makes a great mulch. So, what we want to do is we want to take about two inches of pine straw and just lay it in around our plants that are in the bed; just a nice layer and you just keep laying it around your plants, like so. At North it gets really cold and you will want to mulch to the size of your raised bed especially if you have plenty of vegetables such as asparagus or garlic, also if you have any potted plants that have perennial herb such as this, you want to mulch them also. So, the way that you do that is you get your pine straw and you lay it hard against the sides of the beds and around your pots if you have any and I would sit our pot around the edges of the bed, it helps to kill two birds with one stone. And you keep mulching until you get a nice layer up on the sides of the bed and that insulates the bed like so. This has been Steve Skinner with Kathryn's Garden, and that's some helpful tips for preparing your winter bed.